The End Is Now

Luke’s AK-47 feels warm in my hands. I have a hat, but the summer sun is full on the gunmetal. I should be mentally rehearsing all the instructions Luke gave his tiny army, but instead my mind is full of different images. Of all the things that the world is losing, the things that made the texture of the life I grew up in. Football on crisp autumn afternoons. War movies full of heroism. Sexy military uniforms.

—no reason to be angry at yourself for—

Anna Karenina and Oliver Twist and Charlotte’s Web. Businesses started in garages and built through stubborn, ornery individualism in the face of all consensual wisdom. Sweets did everything by consensus and nobody was stubborn or ornery. Nobody would think of letting an orphan starve, or of throwing themselves under a train for love, or of killing Wilbur the pig for bacon.

—not being as good as your sister is. And without that anger, you’d—

In two generations, maybe less, my lost world would be incomprehensible to the human race. If it survived at all.

—have no idea who you are.

Harbingers of the End Times, the religious nuts call the Sweets. Angels of the apocalypse. But there are all kinds of apocalypses.

The first of the attackers comes into sight down the road. There are three trucks, driving very slow so as to not outpace the walkers beside them. Everyone is armed. On the back of a dusty red pick-up rests some sort of missile launcher. I raise my weapon and wait for Luke’s signal.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-two books, including twenty-five novels, four collections of short stories, and three books about writing. Her work has won two Hugos (“Beggars in Spain” and “The Erdmann Nexus”), five Nebulas (all for short fiction), a Sturgeon (“The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Probability Space). The novels include science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers; many concern genetic engineering. Her most recent work is the Nebula-winning and Hugo-nominated After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall (Tachyon, 2012), a long novella of eco-disaster, time travel, and human resiliency. Forthcoming is another short novel from Tachyon, Yesterday’s Kin (Fall 2014). Intermittently, Nancy teaches writing workshops at various venues around the country, including Clarion and Taos Toolbox (yearly, with Walter Jon Williams). A few years ago she taught at the University of Leipzig as the visiting Picador professor. She is currently working on a long, as-yet-untitled SF novel. Nancy lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.

AGENT ISOLATED David Wellington

There were zombies all over Brooklyn, but at the moment the fires jumping from house to house downtown were the real danger.

There was a germ, a prion, going around that turned people into zombies. Somebody had gotten a bad memo. They’d been told that fire would kill the prion. It didn’t. It killed zombies pretty well, but there were just too many of them and they just kept coming. Now the fires were spreading, too.

Whitman stomped on the brakes as the whole front of a warehouse erupted into the street in front of him. He threw the truck in reverse and got it turned around, looking for a safe way forward, any way forward, any direction.

“There,” the woman in the passenger seat said. He didn’t know her name. He wasn’t sure he’d get a chance to find out. “Head south, to Brighton Beach. There are boats there. There are boats coming there at dawn, and they’ll take us to safety.”

He looked over at her. “Boats?”